Summary: Medicine has come a long way from the days of mercury elixirs, bloodletting, and mummified remains as supposed cures. In Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, Nate Pedersen and Dr. Lydia Kang explore the gruesome, bizarre, and often deadly treatments that once passed for medical science. From toxic metals to tobacco smoke enemas, history reveals a troubling pattern of desperation, ignorance, and “remedies” that did more harm than good.

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, by Nate Pedersen and Dr. Lydia Kang, surveys many of humanity’s most absurd and disturbing past medical practices. The volume presents a particularly gruesome picture of medicine in the preindustrial and early industrial eras.

In the 16th century, a physician known as Paracelsus advanced the view that “mercury, salt, and sulfur would bring about all manner of bodily cures.” By the 17th century, the field of medicine was engrossed in an ideological battle—and both sides were hopelessly wrong. On one side were those who extolled the supposed curative powers of toxic elements like mercury, while the other side favored humoral theory, the pseudoscientific idea that imbalances in four bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) caused illness. “Galenical physicians who extolled the virtues of humoral theory were in a rage about the doctor-chemists who followed Paracelsus . . . and adored the purgative powers of mercury and antimony.”

Paracelsus also promoted the idea of drinking liquefied gold. He claimed, “Drinkable gold will cure all illnesses, it renews and restores.” It was possible to create drinkable gold by reducing gold to a salt called gold chloride that could be mixed into liquid. However, the resulting drink was not the cure-all that Paracelsus promised. “The gold chloride salts could cause kidney damage and something called auric fever, which not only made the sufferer feverish, but also involved profuse salivation and urination.”

“Physicians—such as seventeenth-century botanist and doctor Nicholas Culpeper—continued to prescribe gold for the same reasons Paracelsus did (sometimes even coating the gold chloride with a layer of gold to make a gilded pill, for extra effect). The drawbacks were a risk patients were willing to take” due to misplaced faith in gold’s efficacy.

Paracelsus invented a pill that he called laudanum and that he claimed could even raise the dead. What was this resurrection pill made of? Supposedly, “25 percent opium, plus mummy . . . bezoar stone taken from a cow’s digestive tract, henbane (a sedative and hallucinogenic plant), amber, crushed coral and pearls, musk, oils, the bone from the heart of a stag . . . and unicorn horn (more likely, rhinoceros or narwhal).”

Laudanum inspired copycats. “In the 1600s, Thomas Sydenham popularized his own take on laudanum . . . with one key addition: lots of alcohol. . . . It was touted as a treatment for the plague.”

Purported unicorn horns were once prized for their medical properties—resulting in the deaths of many narwhals and rhinoceroses to provide counterfeit products. “In the sixteenth century, Mary, Queen of Scots reportedly used a unicorn horn to protect her from poisoning.” Mummy-related medicine also had a lengthy pedigree. Hippocrates recommended the following for infertility: ‘When the cervix is closed too tightly the inner orifice must be opened using a special mixture composed of red nitre, cumin, resin, and honey.” “Red nitre” may have referred to soda ash, the same thing that ancient Egyptians used to dry out corpses during mummification. Then there was the frightening medical practice of consuming mummified remains.

An early Arabic medicine ingredient was mineral pitch called mumiya, from the Persian word mūm, or wax. It’s a sticky, sometimes semisolid black form of petroleum that was used for poultices and antidotes. Around the eleventh century, people began to misidentify another supposed source of this mineral pitch, a dark substance found in the head and body cavities of ancient Egyptian embalmed bodies. Called mummia or mumia, it soon became synonymous with the entire embalmed corpse or any products that came from it. What did minerals from a mummy skull taste like? A London pharmacopoeia in 1747 described it as “acrid and bitterish.” . . . Mumia from mummies was in high demand at its peak in popularity in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, partly from being understood as “the sovereign remedy” according to Paracelsus [who believed mummia] could cure almost anything.

“Mummy-infused poultices were used to heal snakebites, syphilitic sores, headaches, jaundice, joint pain, and . . . epilepsy. In 1586, French royal surgeon Amboise Paré exclaimed that when it came to healing bruises, mummy was ‘the first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners.’” A busy trade in mummies sprung up, and “hundreds of pounds of mummy parts were sold to London apothecaries” alone.

Suppliers could not meet the growing market demand for mummified corpses, at least not the ancient Egyptian variety, and often passed off more recently deceased bodies as Egyptian mummies. “After much plundering, mummies became scarce. Counterfeits began to show up in the form of other bodies—beggars, lepers, and plague victims, their corpses scavenged and then stuffed with aloes, myrrh, and bitumen, then baked or dried in a furnace and dipped in pitch.” The mummy medicine trend began to fade in the late 18th century.

There were other unfortunate cures for syphilis. Some patients suffering from syphilis underwent the following treatment regimen. “Elemental mercury was heated for steam baths, where inhalation was considered beneficial (and is a potent route of mercury absorption). Mercuric chloride was added to fat, and the resultant unction rubbed dutifully into sores. Sometimes, bodily fumigations occurred, where a naked patient was placed in a box with some liquid mercury, their head sticking out of a hole, and a fire lit beneath the box to vaporize the mercury. Sixteenth-century Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro remarked that after mercury ointments and fumigations, ‘You will feel the ferments of the disease dissolve themselves in your mouth in a disgusting flow of saliva.’”

Calomel, a mercury chloride mineral, was once used to treat a variety of ailments, including mental illness. Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the US Declaration of Independence, prescribed the following for hypochondria: “Mercury acts in this disease, 1, by abstracting morbid excitement from the brain to the mouth. 2, by removing visceral obstructions. And, 3, by changing the cause of our patient’s complaints and fixing them wholly upon his sore mouth.” Mercury cures retained popularity for a long time. “It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that mercury compounds finally fell out of favor,” as humanity’s understanding of metal toxicity advanced. Today, mercury exposure is known to cause, “tremors, insomnia, memory loss, neuromuscular effects, headaches and cognitive and motor dysfunction,” in addition to kidney damage, nervous system damage, and even death.

Then there was antimony. In 1774, Oliver Goldsmith, the author of books such as The Vicar of Wakefield (one of the bestselling novels of the 18th century), felt ill. He asked an apothecary for St. James’ Fever Powder, a famous patent medicine. “Eighteen hours later, after a lot of vomiting and convulsions, Oliver Goldsmith was dead.” The powder contained antimony, and Goldsmith had consumed a lethal dose.

Antimony causes vomiting (and, in large enough doses, kills). In ancient Rome, Seneca the Younger claimed that some people “vomited to eat, and ate to vomit.” In other words, they induced vomiting to be able to consume more food at feasts than they otherwise could have. “An antimony-containing wine was reportedly used for such purposes.” The trend outlasted ancient Rome. “Fashionable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cups were made out of antimony, fondly called pucula emetic or calicos vomitoriius,” meaning vomit cups. “If too much antimony leached into the wine, the resulting drink would be deadly. One such cup, purchased in London’s Gunpowder Alley in 1637 for 50 shilling, killed three people. Then there were antimony pills. Unlike our one-use pharmaceuticals today, these metal pills were heavy, and after passing through the bowels they were often relatively unchanged. They were dutifully retrieved from latrines, washed, and reused over and over again. The ‘everlasting pills’ or ‘perpetual pills’ were often lovingly handed down from generation to generation as an heirloom.”

The physician Joshua Ward, who served England’s King George II, invented medicines known as “Wards Pill and Ward’s Drop, which he claimed could cure every single human malady from gout to cancer. They contained poisonous amounts of antimony. . . . Some of Ward’s formulations also contained arsenic.”

Patent medicines were often poisonous. “Fowler’s Solution, created in 1786, was 1 percent potassium arsenate with lavender flavoring,” meaning it contained arsenic. “It could cause a thiamine deficiency, leaving people with tingling extremities and racing hearts. . . . Arsenic had a tendency to dilate small capillaries in the face. So people got flushed cheeks and a look of bloom and health,” giving the impression that arsenic-based medicines were improving a patient’s physical condition when the toxin was accomplishing just the opposite. Even after industrialization, it took time for physicians to abandon medicinal arsenic. “Aside from Fowler’s Solution, arsenic products continued to be used freely throughout much of the nineteenth century.”

“Druggists sold gallons of laudanum opium elixirs, and narcotic nostrums. Take Dover’s Powder, an eighteenth century remedy containing opium, ipecac, licorice, saltpeter (potassium nitrate, great for explosives and pickling pork), and vitriolic tartar (potassium sulfate, a fertilizer). While treating colds and fevers, Dover’s Powder could put people to sleep . . . permanently. Of the effective dose—seventy grains—creator Thomas Dover said, ‘Some apothecaries have desired their patients to make their wills before they venture upon so large a dose.’”

It was once believed that tobacco “could cure upward of twenty diseases including cancer.” That is deeply ironic since tobacco causes cancer. Jean Nicot, from whose name we get the word “nicotine,” was a French ambassador to Portugal. “Convinced that tobacco was a nostrum [remedy] and a potential cure for all manner of ills, Nicot bundled up some tobacco plants and made a triumphant return to France, where Catherine de’ Medici was ruling as queen. In 1561, Nicot presented Catherine with tobacco plant leaves and instructions on how to powder the leaves and inhale them through her nose to relieve headaches.” She quickly became addicted. “During a plague outbreak in London in 1665, school children were actually told to smoke in their classrooms as a way to ward off the disease.”

A popular medical use of tobacco was to blow smoke, using bellows, up the anuses of apparent drowning victims in the hopes of reviving the unfortunate individuals.

Tobacco smoke enemas had their day in the sun in the eighteenth century when they were embraced by the British medical community for a very particular purpose: the resuscitation of the drowned. These were the days when drowning in the River Thames was such a frequent occurrence that a society was actually formed and funded with the sole purpose of promoting the resuscitation of drowned people. Elaborately dubbed The Institution for Affording Immediate Relief to Persons Apparently Dead from Drowning, its members prowled the dangerous banks of the Thames, their tobacco smoke enema kits at the ready should any poor soul stumble into the river and need to be revived. If that happened the society members would leap to the rescue, hauling the apparently drowned person out of the river, tearing off all of his clothes, rolling him onto his stomach, sticking an enema tube up his bottom, and striking up the fumigator and the bellows.

Why was such an undignified and futile method of resuscitation employed? Ironically, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, an effective method of revival still used today, “was largely frowned upon by the medical community as ‘vulgar.’”

“In the 1700s, Johann Kimpf loudly proclaimed that all illness came from impacted feces (dry, hard stool that is ‘stuck’ in the colon). Hence, if you expelled them faster with enemas, you were less likely to get sick.” Enemas were seen as a cure-all. Physicians’ tendency to prescribe them for any ailment even became the subject of parody. Medical practitioners’ seeming “love of enemas became so extreme that Moliére’s The Imaginary Invalid poked fun at it in 1673. When the doctor is asked repeatedly how to cure dropsy, then diseased lungs, then chronic illnesses, his response is always ‘Give a clyster, then bleed the patient, afterward purge him. Rebleed him, repurge him, and reclyster him.’” The popularity of this treatment was widespread among the elite. “Clysters had become de rigueur and 2 la mode in fifteenth- and sixteenth century France [that] King Louis XIV was rumored to have enjoyed two thousand treatments in his lifetime.”

Alcohol’s health benefits were also frequently touted. “The thirteenth-century friar Roger Bacon wrote that wine could ‘preserve the stomach, strengthen the natural heat, help digestion, defend the body from corruption, concoct the food till it be turned into very blood.” In other words, he thought that alcohol aided digestion and even helped to convert nutrients into blood, presumably preventing anemia. As late as 1902, The Lancet, a respected medical journal, opined that brandy is “universally regarded as superior to all other spirits from a medicinal point of view.” The Italian physician Aldobrandino of Siena opined in 1256 that drinking beer “makes one’s flesh white and smooth.”

No history of medical quackery would be complete without mention of bloodletting. Bloodletting may have contributed to the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791, at the age of 35. “Bloodletter would smell, touch, and taste the blood . . .  to diagnose the patient.” In 1623, French physician Jacques Ferrand recommended bloodletting as a cure for lovesickness. The practice was not limited to Europe. “The Huang Di Nei Jing texts from the Han Dynasty prescribed bloodletting for symptoms of ‘incessant laughing’ or mania.” Writer Alexander Cruden was institutionalized multiple times for various actions deemed to be acts of insanity, such as criticizing incest among the nobility, and wrote that at Bethlehem Hospital, nicknamed Bedlam, “The common Prescriptions of a Bethlemitical Doctor are a Purge and a Vomit, and a Vomit and a Purge over again, and sometimes a Bleeding.”

In 1685, Charles II of England’s “fourteen physicians were under great pressure to keep him alive. Besides bleeding, the poor king endured enemas, purgatives, and cupping, and had to eat the gallstone of an East Indian goat. Plasters made from pigeon droppings were thoughtfully applied to his feet. They bled copious mounts from him again and again, once even slitting open his jugular veins, At The end, he was left nearly bloodless before he died.” Cupping was a method of bloodletting that entailed scraping the skin and then placing a cup over the area to create suction and draw out blood. He was not the only monarch to suffer such a fate. “Thirty Years Charles II’s niece, Queen Anne—then on the throne herself—was bled and purged after having fits and falling unconscious; she survived only two days after the doctors arrived.” Presidents proved no safer from the perils of bloodletting than kings or queens. In 1799, George Washington’s physicians aggressively “bled him, tried a drink of molasses, vinegar, and butter (which nearly choked him to death), blistered him, bled him again, tried laxatives and emetics, and bled him some more for good measure. A day later, he was bled yet again. All told, he may have been bled of five to nine pints of blood and died shortly after.”

A healer in Homer’s The Iliad, Podalirius, is referred to as a leech because of the creature’s association with that profession. There is historical “evidence of leech use for everything from removing evil spirits (Themison of Laodicea, Syria) to treating hearing loss (Alexander de Tralles). One medieval physician even claimed that it ‘sharpens the hearing, stops tears . . . and produces a musical voice.’”

Leeching was considered a gentle method of bloodletting. “Because leeching practitioners thought that the bloodletting ought to occur closest to the area of problem, the bloodsuckers were placed on the temples for headaches, behind the ears for vertigo, on the back of the head for lethargy, on the belly for stomach ailments, and over the spleen for epilepsy. And for menstrual afflictions, they’d be placed on the upper thighs, vulva, and sometimes directly on the cervix.”

Another strange medical trend involved cauterizing wounds with bizarre rationales. A burning hot nail-like tool known as a “St. Hubert’s key” was driven into flesh to cauterize dog bite wounds in the hope that doing so would prevent rabies. “In 1610, Jacques Ferrand recommended cauterizing the forehead with a searing hot iron for lovesickness. For swelling, a twelfth-century physician recommended no less than twenty burns all over thee body, including the temples, chest, ankles, under the lip, collarbones, hips,” and the list goes on.

Anesthesia was also primitive. “Ancient China used hashish. The Egyptians turned to opium. Dioscorides recommended deadly mandrake with wine. In the Middle Ages, there were even recipes for a ‘soporific sponge’ soaked in mandrake, henbane, hemlock, and opium, then dried in the sun. It was then rinsed in hot water, squeezed but left damp, and applied to the patient’s nose for inhalation.”

A 1758 issue of the Gentlemen’s Magazine reports that after two men were executed by hanging at Kennington Common in London, “a child, about nine months old was put into the hands of the executioner, who nine times, with one of the hands of each of the dead bodies stroked the child over the face” in the hope that this would cure the child’s skin problems (likely boils). There was a long tradition of such practices. Hippocrates wrote of using the “polluted blood of violence” to fight disease. In the first century, Pliny the Elder observed that “the blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were the draught of life.” There are also accounts of people eating gladiators’ livers, again in the hope of curing epilepsy.

In 1651, the English physician John French’s recipe to cure epilepsy suggested the following: “Take the brains of a young man that has died a violent death, together with the membranes, arteries, and veins, nerves . . . and bruise them un a stone mortar until they become a kind of pap. Then put as much of the spirit of wine as will cover it . . . [then] digest it half a year in horse dung.” A 17th-century nosebleed cure entailed scraping moss off of an old skull and stuffing it up one’s nostrils. Christian IV of Denmark was said to have treated his epilepsy with skull powder. “Besides the powdered state, skulls were also shaved like ginger root, or sometimes used as a vessel to drink water.” In the 17th century, “skulls were often found hanging for sale in chemists’ shops in England and throughout Europe.” King Charles II purchased a medical recipe for liquefied and distilled skull that came to be known as the “king’s drops.” The treatment proved popular. For example, in 1686, a woman named Anne Dormer recorded taking “the king’s drops” to treat her feelings of restlessness. “In the 1700s, recommendations for spirit of human skull abounded for swoonings, apoplectic attacks, and nervous fits.”

Fifteenth-century Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino believed youthful blood could revitalize the aged and advised the elderly to “suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely opened vein of the left arm” of a young person, or, if too squeamish for that, to “let [the blood] first be cooked together with sugar, or let it be mixed with sugar and moderately distilled over hot water and then drunk.” Such practices occurred in many places. “An Englishman named Edward Browne witnessed several executions in Vienna in the winter of 1668. After one beheading, he watched ‘a man run speedily with a pot in his hand, and filling it with blood, yet spouting out of [the corpse’s] neck, he presently drank it off.’ Others dipped handkerchiefs into the blood, hoping to cure themselves of epilepsy.” In the 1600s, a German physician suggested, “Choose the carcass of a red[headed] man, whole, clear without blemish, of the age of twenty-four years, that hath been hanged, broke upon a wheel, or thrust-through,” dry-cure his flesh and from it obtain a red healing tincture to treat wounds. Many people also believed that corpses could cure warts. In the 17th century, the English physician Robert Fludd noted that if “a dead bodies hand touch[es] warts they will dye [die].”

The touch of the living could also allegedly cure illness, provided that the touch was that of royalty. Scrofula was a form of tuberculosis that disfigured skin with unsightly growths. In 11th-century France and Britain, “the practice of kings touching scrofula-infected peasantry became legitimized as a medical practice. As a demonstration of their . . . healing prowess, King Edward the Confessor of England (c. 1000–1066) and King Philip I of France (1052–1108) began holding public exhibitions of scrofula healing.” Shakespeare’s Macbeth features a mention of Edward the Confessor’s alleged healing powers.

In 1660, one such healing ceremony, held by Britain’s Charles II, was described this way: “The surgeon cause[d] the sick to be brought or led up to the throne, where they, kneeling, ye king strokes their faces or cheeks with both his hands at once.” In fact, Charles II (1630–1685) touched “some ninety-two thousand scrofula patients during his twenty-five year reign, averaging about thirty-seven hundred people per year.” In France, “Louis XIV celebrated Easter in 1680 . . . by touching sixteen hundred scrofulous patients.” Peasants unable to journey to such a royal ceremony sought out alternative cures. In 1688, a particular horse in the remote Annandale region of Scotland reportedly could “cure the king’s evil [scrofula] by licking the sore.” Not all monarchs believed their hands could heal the sick. William and Mary, who took the English throne in 1689, opposed the practice, with William reportedly telling a diseased subject requesting his touch, “God grant you better health . . . and better sense.”

Women contended with some particularly bizarre medical advice. “For a successful childbirth, first-century scholar Pliny the Elder recommended putting the right foot of a hyena on the pregnant woman to help with the delivery. . . . The left foot would cause death.” He also advised “drinking goose semen” and “drinking liquids that flowed from a weasel’s uterus through its genitals” to pregnant patients. He had a further “recommendation to use a dog’s placenta as a catcher’s mitt to pull out the infant being born.”

The Trotula, a series of 12th-century medical texts from Salerno, recommended that women giving birth consume a potion made from hawk excrement. The Trotula advocated the following method of contraception: “Take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin . . . and she will not conceive.” The authors of Quackery theorize, half-jokingly, that this contraception method may have been effective insofar as it served to disgust and drive away male romantic partners.

Children were routinely drugged. By the 17th century, “nursing mothers and wet nurses even drank gin to pass some of the healing properties of juniper onto the infants in their care. According to William Worth, a Dutch-English distiller: ‘It is a general custom in Holland, when the Child is troubled with Oppressions of Wind, for the Mother whilst the Child is sucking, to drink of the Powers or Spirits of Juniper, by which the Child is Relieved.’”

Drugging children was a long-standing practice. “The Ebers papyrus (1550 BCE) describes using poppy plants mixed with wasp droppings to soothe a crying child. Seventh-century physician and philosopher Avicenna recommended a poppy, fennel, and anise seed potion. From the 1400s until this past century, textbooks recommended varying concoctions with opium and morphine for both sleeplessness and teething. If the baby didn’t want to be weaned? Founding father Alexander Hamilton . . . recommended ‘a little weak white-wine whey, diluted brandy punch, or even a tea-spoonful or two of syrup of poppy . . . to prevent restlessness and fits of crying, till the breast is forgotten.’” A song from the popular musical Hamilton about how deeply the namesake protagonist and his rival Aaron Burr loved their children strikes one rather differently after learning that Hamilton drugged his weaning infants with opium, wine, and brandy to stop them from crying.